One of the most important skills required in limited Magic is the ability to evaluate cards.  Instead of being able to get a decklist from an outside source, limited players need to be able to determine, in a short amount of time, what cards in their sealed pool they should play, or what cards they should draft.  Improper card evaluations lead to bad drafting/deck building, which leads to weaker decks, and ultimately leads to more losses.

With this article I am going to talk about what to look for when evaluating cards for limited play, and talk about different types of cards you may encounter.  Before we can start looking at specific cards and evaluating them, I’d like to first talk about a couple of fundamental concepts of limited Magic so that we can use these concepts to come up with criteria for evaluating cards.  In part two of this article I will talk about specific cards, grouping different types into categories, and talk about the advantages/disadvantages of each type.

The first concept I’d like to talk about is the resources available to a player during a game.

The Resources of Limited Magic

When you boil it down, a game of limited Magic is essentially a war of attrition.  It is a battle between two players to exhaust their opponent’s resources while preserving their own.  The player who gains the resources advantage can generally put themself in a position to be in control of the game, and from there proceed to win.  Unlike constructed formats, most of the time a limited deck can’t be so streamlined that it can ignore its opponent and just win.  Your opponent will have time to interact with you, and games will often go to the player that pulls ahead in the war of resources.  This is obviously an over-simplification and there are other factors to consider, but I consider this to be the fundamental base of limited Magic play.

So what are these resources?  There are four: life, mana, time and cards.  You only have a finite amount of each, and in order to win a player must properly spend their resources to put themselves in an advantageous position.

Cards

Of the four resources, cards are the most obvious and straightforward.  You start with seven, and draw a finite amount more during the game. Only cards that you can actively use to affect the game at a given point in time should be counted as a currently available card resource, while cards in your library, exile zone, graveyard, etc. do not.

Mana

This one’s pretty easy, the amount of this resource that you have is how much mana you can produce each turn.

Life

Essentially, you start out the game with 20 life, and you have all but 1 point of life to spend over the course of the game.  Whether you win the game at 1 life or 20 makes no difference, as only your last point of life truly matters, and so the rest of your life total is an expendable resource that you don’t need.

Time

The last resource is time, which is basically how many turns you have available to you: how many untap steps you have, how many attack phases, etc.  Reducing your opponent’s time and mana is what is generally referred to as a gain in tempo.

The Relative Value of The Resources

So it’s one thing to define the different types of resources, but this doesn’t help us unless we can apply this concept in a way that improves your game.  Understanding the resources of Magic helps us in evaluating cards, because to properly evaluate cards, we need to be able to determine which cards spend resources in the best and most efficient ways.

A card’s function is to do one or more of two possible things: convert some of your resources into different resources, or to spend your resources to reduce your opponent’s resources.

Here are some examples of cards converting resources into other types:

–      When you cast [card]Sign in Blood[/card], you are spending 2 mana, 2 life and 1 card for 2 cards, essentially converting 2 mana and 2 life into 1 card.

–      When you cast [card]Whitesun’s Passage[/card], you are spending 2 mana and 1 card for 5 life.

–      When you cast [card]Doom Blade[/card] on an opponent’s [card]Yavimaya Wurm[/card], you are spending 2 mana and 1 card to cost your opponent 6 mana and 1 card.

With all of these conversions of resources, it is important to know which trades of resources are the most beneficial and which are not.  This means that we need to know the relative value of each type of resource compared to the others. We need to figure out things like: How important is a point of life compared to a card?  How much mana is it worth to spend to gain more cards? Etc.

If I were to rate the relative importance of each resource, it would look something like the following (mathematically exact and professionally drawn) graph:

From the graph we can see that cards are the most important resource, by a significant amount, and that life is the least important.  Mana and time are at similar levels as they are closely related to each other.  Obviously I was joking by saying “mathematically calculated,” and the relative importance of each resource can change depending on the specific game state, but in general this graph gives us a rough guide.  To have a general feeling about this concept is especially important when drafting or building a sealed pool, where there is no game state to dictate how important a specific resource is at that point in time.

Why are cards are the most important resource by such a margin?  Because cards are the only resource that provide you with ways to interact with the other resources.

What we should take from the idea outlined above is that you should be more willing to spend the less valuable resources, and try to preserve the more valuable ones. Cards that spend important resources to get less important resources should be avoided, while cards that spend resources you don’t care about as much for more valuable ones are generally better.  Similarly, cards that spend your important resources to reduce your opponents’ less valuable resources are bad,  and cards that spend your less valuable resources to reduce your opponents’ valuable resources are good.

At this point I’d like to stress an important point that some people forget: playing a card spends a card. This means that whatever the card does, it usually needs to gain you at least 1 card’s worth of resources.  Alternatively, playing cards that have a presence on the board, such as creatures, shouldn’t be considered a loss of cards.  A creature is an object that has an ability to affect the game and reduce your opponent’s resources, so playing a creature is not reducing your card resources.

The Affects The Board Principle

So now that we understand the different resources, how they can be converted, and their relative value to each other, we can talk about a valuable concept.  For lack of a better name I’ll call it The Affects The Board Principle.  This isn’t an unbreakable rule that must always be followed, but if you stick to it most of the time, you’ll be well off.

The Affects the Board Principle is this: try to play cards that directly affect the active card resources within a game of Magic.  By this I mean that you want to play cards that reduce your opponent’s card resources, increase your own card resource, or have a physical presence in play in the game. With every card, try to ask yourself the question, “does this card affect the board?”  If a card doesn’t follow the Affects The Board Principle, it more often than not isn’t worth spending a card for its effect.

It might be alright to include a small amount of cards in a limited deck that don’t follow the principle, for tempo swings and/or game ending effects, but I find that if a deck has too many cards that don’t follow the principle, you’ll find yourself down in the war of card advantage and lose control of the game.

When evaluating cards that don’t follow the principle, you need to consider if its effect is worth the loss in card advantage.  Is the effect game-ending?  Does the effect create enough of a change in tempo that its worth the loss in card resources?  How often will the card be sitting in your hand useless, waiting for a specific moment when it will be useful?

Consistency

The last concept I want to talk about before we can start to actually evaluate cards is consistency.  It is a good idea to try to avoid cards that aren’t consistent.  By this I mean that you should avoid cards that don’t have a valuable effect a high percentage of the time.

The following card is consistent:

The following card is inconsistent:

So what do we do about the following card?  Not 100% consistent, but worth consideration:

The problem with inconsistent cards is that if you draw the card in a situation where it doesn’t do its full effect, you’ve essentially drawn no card at all.  Drawing blanks puts you behind in the battle of card resources, and helps your opponent take control of the game.  If you’re looking to consistently win matches, you can’t afford for this to be happening often.

One rule of thumb you could follow is to only play cards that are 100% consistent.  If you follow this rule in a strict way, in general you wouldn’t be bad off.  Sometimes however it’s worth breaking this rule, if a card is powerful enough.  How do we determine if a card is worth it?  We have to ask ourselves a set of questions:

–      How likely is it that the card will have the desired effect?

–      Does the card at least have a lesser effect when it doesn’t do its full effect?  Is the lesser effect still worth playing the card?

–      Is the effect powerful enough to warrant the risk of being inconsistent?

–      How many other inconsistent cards are we already playing? How likely is it that we’ll get in a situation with too many cards in hand that don’t do anything relevant?

There’s no exact formula to determine if a card passes these questions well enough, it’s just something you have to think about on a case by case basis.

Break Until Next Week

It turned out that the introductory theory to the article has run long, so we’ll have to break and continue this article next week.  In the next article, I’ll apply these concepts to actual cards, and define groups of cards with similar characteristics and how to evaluate them for limited play.

Until next week.

– Paul